Thoughts on Money

We need to remember that the market is not the economy, and the economy is not the market. And the economy makes me very worried about food banks. Children are hungry, people are hungry. And when kids can’t eat they can’t pay attention in school, and if they can’t pay attention in school they can’t be good students; they can’t move forward in the... See more

That was our first lesson. To earn money, we did some house chores that we called “job-jobs”.

You could only do the paying “job-jobs” after your regular household chores.

She continued to build on this by talking to us about our futures and encouraging us to save to meet different goals instead of spending it all.

Risk isn’t a measure of negative consequences. It’s a measure of uncertainty. And the issue with minimizing risk is that while we protect our downside, we prevent ourselves from achieving any sort of meaningful upside. In this way, risk minimization isn’t an insurance policy as much as it is a collar, and the cost of protecting our downside is the... See more

after writing about money for a decade, what have I figured out about money, you ask? financial security isn't a number, it’s a relationship with "enough."

no number will ever feel like enough when your sense of security is tied to one. you hit the milestone, the goalpost moves, you blame yourself for moving it.

But consumption smoothing pays homage to an existential reality: Life itself is the ultimate scarce asset. The future is unknowable, and religiously maintaining a double-digit savings rate through the worst squalls of life is not of the utmost importance.

Security is fundamentally about being able to hold and stay in the tension of uncertainty without compulsively resolving it or dispelling it.